This is from the Huffington Post. One can only hope that Kerry will follow through. For a quick primer on Kerry’s grasp of climate science, see this WUWT article: Kerry Blames Tornado Outbreak on Global Warming and a rebuttal Increasing tornadoes or better information gathering? I get a kick out of Kerry’s line “This has to stop”. Okay then, please debate Mr. Will, put a stop to it Mr. Kerry! – Anthony
John KerryFacts Are Stubborn Things: George Will and Climate Change-
To paraphrase the conservative columnist’s favorite president, “There you go again, George.”
George Will has been one of my favorite intellectual sparring partners for a long time, a favorite more recently because he had the guts to publicly recognize the disaster that was George W. Bush’s presidency.
But in his latest Washington Post column, George and I have a pretty big loud disagreement.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to see Will embracing the idea of recycling, but I’m very troubled that he is recycling errors of fact to challenge the science on global warming.
I’m even more troubled that Will used his February 15th column not only to cast doubt on sound science, but also to denigrate the work of two fine scientists.
Let’s be very clear: Stephen Chu does not make predictions to further an agenda. He does so to inform the public. He is no Cassandra. If his predictions about the effects of our climate crisis are scary, it’s because our climate is scary.
Likewise, John Holdren is a friend of mine and one of the best scientific minds we have in our country. Pulling out one minor prediction that he had some unknown role in formulating nearly three decades ago, as Will did in his February 15th column, and then using that to try to undo his credibility as a scientist may be a fancy debating trick, but it’s just plain wrong when it comes to a debate we can’t afford to see dissolve into reductio ad absurdum hijinx. (A side note: The incident in question occurred in 1980, which, as I recall, was just about the time Ronald Reagan made the claim that approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation and that, consequently, we should “not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards from man-made sources.”)
Dragging up long-discredited myths about some non-existent scientific consensus about global cooling from the 1970s does no one any good. Except perhaps a bankrupt flat earth crowd. I hate to review the record and see that someone as smart as George Will has been doing exactly that as far back as 1992. And it’s especially troubling when the very sources that Will cites in his February 15th column draw the exact opposite conclusions and paint very different pictures than Will provides, as the good folks at ThinkProgress and Media Matters for America have demonstrated so thoroughly.
This has to stop. A highly organized, well-funded movement to deny the reality of global climate change has been up and running for a long time, but it doesn’t change the verdict: the problem is real, it’s accelerating, and we have to act. Now. Not years from now.
No matter how the evidence has mounted over two decades — the melting of the arctic ice cap, rising sea levels, extreme weather — the flat earth caucus can’t even see what is on the horizon. In the old Republican Congress they even trotted out the author of Jurassic Park as an expert witness to argue that climate change is fiction. This is Stone Age science, and now that we have the White House and the Congress real science must prevail. It is time to stop debating fiction writers, oil executives and flat-earth politicians, and actually find the way forward on climate change.
This is a fight we can win, a problem we can overcome, but time is not on our side. We can’t waste another second arguing about whether the problem exists when we need to be debating everything from how to deal with the dirtiest forms of coal as the major provider of power in China to how to vastly increase green energy right here at home.
“Facts are stupid things,” Ronald Reagan once said. He was, of course, paraphrasing John Adams, who could have been talking about the science on global change when he said, “Facts are stubborn things.”
Stubborn or stupid — lets have a real debate and lets have it now.
I know George Will well, I respect his intellect and his powers of persuasion — but I’d happily debate him any day on this question so critical to our survival.
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I would prefer the debate between Moncton and Gore.
Remember how they used to say.. George Bush is in the pocket of Big-Oil?
Maybe Obama and JFKerry are in the pocket of Big-Wind?
Isn’t Jeffery Immelt (CEO of GE) on the presidential advisory board?
Jepe makes a good point: Kerry has already contradicted himself in his article. But his claim that we “can’t waste” any more time debating is a ridiculous one anyway, especially when we’re debating such a far-reaching and important issue such as this one.
Of course, I would also love to see such a debate. I suspect, however, that much of what would come out of Kerry’s mouth would be a rehash of the sorts of claims he makes in the article – melting ice caps, “severe” weather, etc. – which coincidentally are not “evidence” of global warming at all, even were all those things unambiguously true.
Shoot, I’ll debate John Kerry. Any time, any place… How to be so lucky to have the opportunity to put that jerk in his place!
Stubborn or stupid?
Kerry said:
“In the old Republican Congress they even trotted out the author of Jurassic Park as an expert witness to argue that climate change is fiction. This is Stone Age science,…”
In addition to being an asinine, illogical smear tactic against Michael Chrichton, to equate the Jurassic period, some 160-200 mya with the Stone Age, some 600-700 kya is hilariously, mind-bogglingly stupid.
Our climate is scary Kerry? No, but you and your moronic ilk and your pseudoscience are. You are the ones who must be stopped.
I would be a little less skeptical of the AGW arguments if their prescriptions for solving it were a reduction in government instead of more.
Kerry and Gore are two pseudo intellectual peas in a pod.
So this walking mop who lost in a debate against George “Internets” Bush wants to debate science now?
What we truly need is a series of public debates between reputable scientists. We also need to make the general public aware of the unscientific nature of the “consensus” and “settled science” arguments. After all, as Lee Smolin states in his book “The Trouble with Physics” a science is not robust if it does not tolerate dissent.
Timing is something John Kerry, who was in Vietnam, doesn’t yet have a handle on. Most of the other posts criticizing George Will came out not long after Will’s column. Kerry, on the other hand, comes out AFTER everyone learned of the catastrophic sensor
error“drift” (chuckle) that was hugely under-reporting the polar ice extent. Not really up on the “stubborn facts,” John.Heck, even I could debate Kerry on the subject. I, too, was in Vietnam, though I don’t have as many medals because our outfit didn’t let you write up your own citations.
John Kerry: “Likewise, John Holdren is a friend of mine and one of the best scientific minds we have in our country.”
Lubos Motl:” John Holdren is the ultimate example of the pseudointellectual impurities that have recently flooded universities and academies throughout the Western world.”
http://motls.blogspot.com/search?q=holdren
Who should I believe, the politician or the prominent physicist?
I’d pay a lot more than $10 to see a debate of Al Gore, Kerry, Will, Dr Spencer and John Cristy.
Now that would be a cracker !!!
I don’t think a debate between these two would be productive at all. It would be merely political rhetoric on both sides. We’ve had enough of that already.
Fred
The real scary thing is that a guy from the wilds of Kenya has become president. Lets hope he has forgotten most of how they manage dissenters.
I just sent John boy a formal challenge trough his Senate website. I doubt he has the guts.
The nightmare of John Kerry’s running for President finally ended when he lost the election. Now I must be dreaming. John Kerry debate George Will on any subject. Oh that it were so. Alas, the alarm that will awake me from this dream will be Senator Kerry’s backing out of the debate.
Kerry was ineffective at fighting off charges of cowardice during his election campaign. That’s irrelevant here, but I watched several videos of the incident where the student was Tasered during his speech. Kerry just stood by and everybody ignored him. My guess is that Kerry suggests this debate only because he knows the MSM will support him. “intellectual sparring partners” — that’s funny. “fancy debating trick” — name calling like “flat earth caucus”, bringing up the convenient demons of “oil executives”, or using ‘facts’ like “highly organized, well-funded movement to deny the reality of global climate change has been up and running for a long time”, or dissing Michael Crichton. Yes, I’d love to see this debate, it should be just as much fun as watching WWF.
But if he really wants a debate I’d suggest that the audience be composed entirely of scientific fact-checkers and that the debate be restricted to the science. My bet is that Kerry would chicken out.
What we truly need is a series of public debates between reputable scientists. We also need to make the general public aware of the unscientific nature of the “consensus” and “settled science” arguments. After all, as physicist Lee Smolin has stated a science is not robust if it does not tolerate dissent.
Ah yes, the classic AGW rhetoric.
We can’t waste another second arguing about whether the problem exists.
This is just the most outrageous statement. The sky is falling and we must all build umbrellas immediately.
Fred, I hate to say it, but the guy we’ve got is scarier than Kerry.
I don’t even want to see a televised debate between scientists. AGW has become an issue on par with religion or politics in general. There are so many bad data, so many tortured statistics and figures, so many specious arguments and emotional appeals, that it’s hopelessly tangled and what little we could know of the truth has been obscured. The only way any side can be proven right is to wait and see, and that’s what hurts agnostic AGW skeptics like myself.
When it comes to complex chaotic systems, be they markets, crime trends in large cities, or planetary climate, no one really knows anything. We can know subsets of the whole, but the myriad of subtle and almost random effects accumulating and playing off one another makes prediction and sometimes even retroactive understanding impossible. There are lots of interesting scientific endeavors towards understanding these subsystems, but they have little value as predictive instruments.
So what invariably happens in these types of arguments is that one side gains traction through blustering and yelling and impressive looking graphs and self-serving, cherry-picked data analyses and shuts the other sides out. This is where herding behavior becomes the tyranny of the majority.
I’m not interested in seeing any debates between or amongst blowhards. I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen with our climate, but whatever does happen, it would take a very thorough, bulletproof argument to convince me that any person or group of persons really understood how and why it happened, or that humans had any significant part in it. I dread cap-and-trade and the fallout from it. I just enjoy watching climate happen.
I know that mentioning religious aspects of AGW and Mother Nature-saving movements is frowned upon here, but apparently even official religions are jumping the greenie bandwagon with carbon-fasting or Carbon Lent:
http://www.twilightearth.com/2009/02/10-best-ways-to-carbon-fast-for-lent-ash-wednesday-2009/
commented at:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6290/
And don’t forget, that even having a latte is aparently pernicious, although I would like to know, how a simple cup of latte might transform to 5 gallons of water. Does a latte made at home has the same impact?
How much water goes into that single Latte you buy on the way to work? 50 Gallons!
John Kerry will debate right after he releases his navy records.
Debates across contrasting backgrounds (politician versus journalist) doesn’t work for me. How about this as a dream debate though.
Kerry, Revkin, and Hansen versus Monckton, Will, and Spencer. I’d replace Will with Andrew Bolt myself though. It’ll never happen, of course, but wouldn’t you pay money to see it?
I fell asleep halfway through Kerrys rant. What was he talking about…
Speaking of dream debates that’ll never happen Monckton versus Gore is my all-time fave, although that Mann versus McIntyre idea mentioned earlier is pretty tasty. You’d maybe have to hire the Jerry Springer crew to referee that last one.